DX11: Lost Planet 2

Lost Planet 2 is the second installment in the saga of the planet E.D.N. III, ten years after the story of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. The snow has melted and the lush jungle life of the planet has emerged with angry and luscious flora and fauna. With the new environment comes the addition of DirectX-11 technology to the game.

Lost Planet 2 takes advantage of DX11 features including tessellation and displacement mapping on water, level bosses, and player characters. In addition, soft body compute shaders are used on 'Boss' characters, and wave simulation is performed using DirectCompute. These cutting edge features make for an excellent benchmark for top-of-the-line consumer GPUs.

The Lost Planet 2 benchmark offers two different tests, which serve different purposes. This article uses tests conducted on benchmark B, which is designed to be a deterministic and effective benchmark tool featuring DirectX 11 elements.

There has been a dearth of mainstream motherboards with dual 16x PCI-Express connections lately. My 1156/i5 combo is a very cost-effective platform for gaming, but with high end cards, the 8X PCI-E connectivity starts to hit bandwidth limits. This card, as over-the-top as it may seem, is an excellent way to get the full performance of two 6970-class GPUs with one slot.

I know it seems ironic to talk about budget when we're discussing a $700 video card, but if I take the money I would have spent on an X58/LGA1366 motherboard and a top-of-the-heap CPU and put it towards the video card, I think it's a better bang for the $$$$.

I can see where you're coming from, but I dont think 1366 is expensive enough to justify buying the 6990 over a cheaper crossfire/Sli setup which will have comparable performance.

Another problem is, whilst high end cards are great fun and all that, they're currently redundant. Current PC games are becoming so heavily gimped by the console market that we're not seeing anything worth buying these parts for. Having said that I've not played Crysis 2 yet, but it's a console port. Bleh.

Suhaib is correct. I don't know where people are getting their news from. Just because it's going to consoles doesn't mean it was PORTED from consoles. Crytek has stated multiple times that CryEngine3 was developed for the PC first, ported to consoles second.

Have you played the multiplayer demo? As soon as you start up the game, you're greeted by a "PRESS START TO CONTINUE" screen regardless of if you're on keyboard/mouse or controller (or were, I think they patched it). They pulled an Infinity Ward on Crysis 2. There's even an aim assistance option in the settings menu. If not for console, it was definitely designed for the controller, which, to me, is still showing how little most devs care about PC now.

What a rip off.699.00 thats a hundred over the hd 5970 when it was released.The only reason it is this high, is the fact that there is no competitive card out there.An extra 2 gigs doesn't cost a hundred dollars.

...and is faster, quieter, and gives you the option of starting with one 6970 and upgrading later. Aside from "fastest single graphics card" bragging rights, I really don't see the point to a card like this.

Adam makes a very Valid point with the Push start to continue message. Cytek can say this and say that but the game is obviously geared towards the Console market. As far as the card goes, weve seen this power struggle between Nvidia and Ati for years now. It is funny that Nvidia top 2 cards ATM have to be in SLI'd just to keep up. but soon as Nvidias 6xx series comes out then yep you guessed it balls back in Nvidia court again until Ati releases their 7xxx series. the pattern continues on. But not one person here can disagree that the PC gaming world IS being hindered one way shape or form of the badly aged current gen Console market.And until Microsoft/Sony and yes Nintendo release their next gen consoles PC gaming will be at a Tech crunch. and really until then these type are cards ARE redundant, with only a FPS gain, but a decent CPU and Crossfire/SLI setup is more then enough for even the newest of games at eye candy Resolution/Settings.